The Glass Magician (The Paper Magician Trilogy #2)(18)
She squinted toward the road in the starlight, just barely able to see a silhouette there, at the edge of the bank. The man in the lights. She had seen a man.
Her feet hit muddy ground, and Emery stopped moving, his eyes glued to the figure he too had noticed.
A light appeared farther down the road—another buggy. For a brief moment it highlighted the tall, lanky form of the man standing there, his curly hair and dark skin. Ceony squinted, thinking she recognized him, but he vanished in a cloud of smoke before she could place him. The buggy lights slowed their approach, the driver perhaps perceiving the signs of the accident.
Both of Emery’s arms embraced Ceony as the water surrounded them. “I’m sorry,” he whispered into her wet hair. “I’m so sorry. It’s all right now. You’re all right.”
He kissed her forehead.
Ceony came fully back to herself. She realized she was still crying, her tears scorching compared to the cold river water. Her teeth chattered.
Ceony buried her face in Emery’s wet clothes, shivering, and stayed that way until a second set of buggy lights appeared on the road. Someone beamed a Gaffer light out onto the water.
“They’re looking for us,” Emery whispered. “Reveal,” he said, and the spell hiding them folded itself back up and dropped into the water. Emery let the current carry it away. Then he helped Ceony up and guided her to the steep shore. She clung to him, not even loosening her grip when he waved one arm to the searchers, asking for help. One of them returned to his car, perhaps for rope, or another light.
“That wasn’t Grath,” Ceony murmured.
“No, it wasn’t,” Emery agreed.
Ceony detected familiarity in those words.
Whoever their attacker had been, Emery knew him.
CHAPTER 6
CEONY SAT IN A chair in the corner of the South London police station, thumbing the wet remnants of Fennel, who had been in her bag when the buggy hit the river. Emery had assured her that the dog could be repaired. At the moment, though, the paper magician was speaking to a local detective and Mg. Juliet Cantrell of Criminal Affairs behind a locked door, and Ceony sat alone in the empty police station, cradling the soggy remnants of her dog in her lap.
She stifled a yawn, and a hiccup, thanks to the small dose of cognac Mg. Cantrell had given her to calm her nerves. The cherrywood cuckoo clock on the back wall struck thirty minutes past midnight.
Ceony turned her gaze to the door Emery had disappeared behind nearly an hour ago. He had been involved with law enforcement on a deeper level for years, Ceony knew, but she still wished she could hear the discussion. Emery had seemed rather adamant that she wait out here. Was he trying to protect her, or did he simply not trust her?
She had been as useful as a sack of weevil-eaten flour when the buggy went over the riverbank. Had she been alone, she would be dead in the water, floating alongside the driver, whose name she didn’t even know.
The driver. The crash blurred in her memory, but she remembered his gruesome death clearly. A simple swipe of another’s hand, and he had died. An Excision spell; Ceony had no other explanation for it.
The door opened. Ceony perked up, but only the detective emerged, holding an unmarked, yellow folder full of papers. From a glance, she could tell the folder had a “no-eyes” lock on it—it would only open when given a specific command, though that command did not necessarily need to come from a magician. Emery had taught her about that spell just last week.
The detective glanced around, set one paper on an unoccupied desk, and then crossed the room toward Ceony. He pulled up a chair and sat across from her, their knees just two feet apart. He held an expensive pen with a tiny Smelting seal on its end—a seal that would light up when the pen was about to run out of ink. Ceony had used similar pens during her schooling at Tagis Praff.
He set a ledger printed with the seal of Criminal Affairs on his lap.
Criminal Affairs, though strictly a branch of the Magicians’ Cabinet, worked closely with all of England’s law enforcement both domestically and abroad. A few magicians even worked with detective agencies that weren’t associated with Criminal Affairs. Ceony assumed involvement with the Magicians’ Cabinet got overly political, so she couldn’t blame them.
Ceony took a long look at the detective before her, his coffee-stained shirt and what looked like a Smelted gun in a holster over his shoulder. Smelters often operated alongside law enforcement; had Ceony become a Smelter like she’d originally planned, she might have been here under a different capacity.
The detective frowned. “Do you need a blanket, Miss Twill?”
Ceony shook her head, though her wet waistband had begun to itch. “I’m fine, thank you.”
“I’m sorry to make you repeat yourself,” the detective apologized, “but could you recount your story once more? Give me as many details as you can remember.”
Chewing on her bottom lip, Ceony nodded. She recounted the accident as best she could, trying to keep her voice smooth, though that proved difficult when she spoke of the driver’s fate. She couldn’t recount more than the beginning and the end of the story—once the buggy hit the water, her mind had just stopped working.
Useless.
The detective asked her a few more questions, then thanked her and stood, returning his chair to the desk he had borrowed it from. A few moments later, he disappeared back into the closed room where Mg. Cantrell and Emery were still talking.